California just moved a bit closer to reducing some of the “soft costs” of installing solar with an assembly bill meant to streamline permitting and inspection for small residential solar systems.

As solar hardware costs have plummeted, overhead (or “soft costs”) have become the majority cost piece of the installation. Soft costs are challenging to tease out of a bill of materials and more difficult to eliminate, as they straddle municipal government, building codes and human labor and behavior. The litany of soft costs includes supply chain costs, installation labor, customer acquisition, permitting, inspection, interconnection, subsidy applications and system design costs.